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Mark Lensenmayer

What's happening, AFAIK, is that the new one is "in the works" as we speak. They aren't going to spend any more money to have any more of the old, "Image" trailers made up in the mean time. If you run out of them you are done. You'll just have to be sure you take extra good care of the trailers you have left, because that's probably all you are going to get until the new ones come out. If your trailers get too beat up to show, the official word is to just pull them out and don't play anything. It's better to have nothing than to show crappy film. I have also heard that you could be getting some "stock" trailers to hold you over until the new ones arrive. If you get them play them (and take CARE of them!) If not, like I said, it's better to play NO policy trailer than to play a beat up one.

Having trailers made is not an inexpensive undertaking. From what I understand, if you our I went to the company and said, "Make me a 30 second trailer", you wouldn't get out the door for anything less than a couple thousand bucks. Expand that to "Cinemark Proportions" and you could easily see that Mr. Mitchell is probably going to shell out about a million bucks to make this new policy trailer. Thus, you'll understand why it takes so long.

Anyway, whoever is blowing that sunshine up your ass about Lee Roy spending millions on new policy trailers needs a wake up call. That's a bunch of bull

Yes, I suppose spending a million bucks was hyperbole. I guess what I was trying to say is that considering the state of financial affairs throughout the movie biz, it's a lot of money to spend even if it isn't a million.

I've approached Cinemark about re-vitalizing Joe, or even running the old trailers again as a nostalgia kind of thing (the first ones we did were over 12 years ago, so a lot of current moviegoers wouldn't have seen them). The whole idea originally was to produce a library of them that could be rotated. The latest I've heard, which just makes me want to gag if it's true, is that they are going to do a trailer contest between film schools to come up with a corporate trailer (shades of Lowes Cineplex!!). That probably means some crappy live action-shot on video-transferred to film trailer that wears out it's welcome quickly (Pepsi Girl, anyone?) that will require the same amount of money striking the prints.

Oh, by the way, we were selling video compilations of the FRJoe trailers on our website for a while, really just for fun since we occasionally get email from Cinemark employees that still like the cats. I think we were asking $19.95 for a tape. We quit when Cinemark's lawyers sent us a letter demanding us to cease and desist from selling the tapes with their characters (although they did buy the rights to most of the characters from us for a very small amount of money, we still own the copyrights to the trailers, but this wasn't worth arguing). We offered to share our vast proceeds with them 50/50, which would have made their check around $60!

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Could you offer the tapes free of charge? In other words, was it the fact that you were making millions of dollars with Cinemark's characters the problem here? Or is it that Cinemark does not want the "childish" antics of their animated mascot seen by the public? (Either being just a bit uptight if you ask me.)

I always liked the original Front Row Joe's myself, but by the time the 4th one hit, it was obvious that Cinemark was trying to cut out the violence, which made them start getting lame. Those first few were entertaining and had a very nice Dolby A track on them.

I'll bet the reason why Cinemark will not use the older trailers now is due to the product advertising within them. My favorite is on the 2nd trailer where the camera turns to the screen and it says something like "this auditorium features Peavey speakers, for the ultimate in sound!" That's just hilarious, especially since back in the day Peavey was only known for crappy, loud guitar amps. No doubt Peavey helped defray the cost of the trailers though.

Actually, one of the reasons they may be loathe to reprint the first 3 FRJoe's is that they were 2 minutes long! I think they got a few complaints from frequent patrons that didn't dig the cats. Typically, it seems like you only hear from people that DON'T like something, but the complaints were offset by people that would write us asking about buying animation cels or getting copies of the trailer, or just asking what the names of the various characters were. We even got a request from a high school marching band that wanted the music to the latest Joe trailer to play at half time.
Just FYI, the first 3 Joe trailers were mixed at Skywalker Sound by Gary Summers with sound effects by Gary Rydstrom, 2 guys that have gotten lots of Oscars from their feature work. I agree that the first ones were the best (as is the case with most films and sequels). Since the basic policies stayed the same, it was a challange coming up with new ideas, particularly as the trailers got shorter.

Does anyone have a list of movies that he has mixed? It seems every time a really, really, really good sound mix comes along, his name is associated with it.